Perhaps you have heard of this thing calls ‘apps.’ As the app industry has grown and matured, its complexity has mushroomed. Making sense of what’s up and what’s down is incredibly hard to do.

Over the past few months I’ve started to use App Annie to track the performance of apps in the iOS store. Its tools are a way to cut through the bullshit, and see how an app is performing today, and how it has in the past.

To get a better handle on what’s going on, I caught up with App Annie and its CEO Bertrand Schmitt to talk over the app economy and, even more, what is next for apps in general.